I went yesterday evening to a seminar arranged in London by the
Social Affairs Unit. This began with a brief lecture by Theodore
Dalrymple, a doctor who writes an occasional column for The
Spectator. His theme was “The Proletarianisation of British
Culture”. He explained how notions of politeness and restraint
were vanishing from the middle classes, being replaced by an
increasing vulgarity of thought and behaviour; and that this was not a
vulgarity copied from the working classes, but was part of a general
decline also affecting them. It was a brief lecture, and was intended
as no more than a summary of the problem. The discussion was then
thrown open for others to supply answers or other pertinent
comments.

These seminars, I think, have been arranged to allow free
discussion in private; and so I will not report the discussion, or
even say who else was there. Instead, I will give my own thoughts on
the problem. I believe that much of the vulgarity of thought and
behaviour can be traced to a failure throughout the English speaking
world, since about 1960, to understand the meaning and value of
education.

I will not presume to say what is the purpose of life. Though I
wish it were otherwise, I suspect there is no objective purpose, and
it is up to us as individuals to supply our own. But whatever the
case, I think it reasonable to say that our purpose ought to be to
make ourselves as happy as we can, and to contribute as much as we can
to the general stock of happiness.

Now, happiness comes in many forms and is found in many places. If
we want ecstatic pleasure, that can be found in any number of legal
and illegal substances. If we want uncomprehending contentment, there
are lobotomies or courses of electric shock therapy. But given that
most people reading this article are at least moderately intelligent,
I will not bother with criticising these kinds of happiness. For us,
happiness surely includes understanding and even wisdom. This requires
some subordination of present to future objectives, and in particular
getting the best education of which we are capable. I will define an
educated person as someone who can hold an interesting conversation
with himself throughout the whole uncertain course of his adult
life—someone with a fair knowledge of human nature, a tolerance of the
milder follies, an understanding of the limits of what is possible, a
calm equanimity of temper, and, ideally, with a sense of humour. Some
of these qualities are innate. Others must be acquired.

A person who possesses these qualities cannot fail to be an
interesting and a pleasing companion to himself through life. And the
existence of many such people, largely connected with each other,
gives rise to what the economists call a positive externality. A
country in which the tone of life is set by such a class of people is
invariably a more pleasant place to be than a country where such a
class does not exist. That country will be more beautiful in its
arrangement of material objects, and more gentle in its courtesies.
Its laws will be more humanely framed and more humanely applied. Its
politics will be steadier in their course and more temperate in their
ends. It will go to war less often, and then mostly for the pursuit of
legitimate interests. Because of the greater security of life and
property, and the greater respect for thrift and sobriety, it will
also be richer and more powerful.

Such an education means a training in habits of thought and the
exercise of general intellectual ability. It may require the
acquisition of specific skills—for example, learning at least one of
the classical languages and few modern languages, and learning some of
the technical aspects of music and the visual arts. It may also
require an understanding of mathematics and of the natural sciences.
It certainly requires a long study of literature and history and
philosophy and law and political economy. But none of this may be
useful in any direct financial sense.

This is not to disparage purely technical or professional training.
These are not at all to be despised. Some while ago, I took a course
in bookbinding, and was filled with respect for the skill and
dedication of the old man who taught me. Accountancy and legal
practice and medicine and the ability to see and make use of
previously undiscovered business opportunities, are all of high value.
But they are not in themselves education. My instructor in bookbinding
was a man of wide culture. Not only did he know how to put books
together, but he also had a strong appreciation of what he was putting
together. I know accountants and lawyers and physicians who can keep
me happily awake until three in the morning as we discuss the state of
the world. That, however, is because they are not just what they have
trained to become. It is because they are also educated men.

The problem we are now facing is largely the outcome of a decline
of respect for humanistic education. My dear friend Dennis
O’Keeffe is famous for his denunciations of what he calls
socialist education—this being a denial that there is any value
in the traditional curriculum, and that the cultures of all social
classes and of all racial and national groups are equally valuable;
and even that ours is inferior, so far as it contains within itself at
least the implicit claim to general hegemony over all others. With
this goes the dangerous absurdities of structuralism and post-
modernism.

Of course, Dennis is right. But it is not only Michel Foucault and
Louis Althusser and Herbert Bowles and Samuel Gintis who are to blame
for the attack on humanism. It is also the intellectual philistinism
of our own intellectual allies. When I was a boy, I got into an
argument with my mathematics teacher, an Armenian Marxist who wore
jeans in class an long leather boots spray painted green—this
was the 1970s. I asked him one day what was the value of the
simultaneous equations he was trying to teach us how to solve. He made
what I now realise was a good attempt to explain their value, but
began to lose his temper when I failed to understand him. Many years
later, I read of a similar exchange in Alexandria between Euclid and
one of his students. Euclid, it seems, did not even try to explain
himself. Instead, he told his assistant to give the man his money back
and throw him into the street.

I now understand the value of knowledge that has no immediate or
obvious use. Sadly, many others who call themselves libertarians or
conservatives do not. With their talk of “vocational
learning” and “learning based outcomes”, they deny
the value of any education that is not directed to the gaining of
marketable skills.

I know of schools that teach information technology but not
history. Again, I do not dispute the value of technical skills. I am
proud of my ability to build computers and to make software work: my
own website is almost entirely crafted by hand in HTML. But history
also is important. An accountant who is ignorant of the French
Revolution, or cannot recognise sonata form, or knows not a line of
poetry, is nothing more than a skilled barbarian. In a nation where
only a small minority is truly educated, legal equality becomes a hard
concept to maintain, let alone political equality. In a nation without
even that minority, public life must inevitably become savage and
arbitrary—a thing of wild, inconstant passions, led by those
unable to perceive or follow longer term goods.

That is where, I think, we are now fast approaching. We have a
Prime Minister who cannot spell, and is not ashamed of the fact. We
have a political class in general that lacks nearly all skill of
persuasive speech and seems ignorant of the past. Of the first
Ministers appointed to serve under Tony Blair, apparently, the
majority listed football as their main hobby in their Who’s Who
entries; and not one listed any humanistic pursuit. I doubt if the
Conservatives are much better. Perhaps the Judges and permanent heads
of department will soon follow the trend. Little wonder our freedoms
are being given up, one at a time, to moral panics and appeals to
administrative convenience.

Is there anything to be done? I am not sure that there is in the
short term. It takes centuries of moral evolution to achieve the level
from which we have now declined. Between the renaissance vulgarities
of behaviour described by Norbert Elias to the gentility of life in
the 1900s lie 500 years of gradual improvement. To suppose that the
present decline can be arrested and turned round in one lifetime is
perhaps too optimistic. But there are certain steps that may easily be
taken towards an eventual improvement. One of the participants in the
seminar last night described how he had thrown out his television set,
and how this had already contributed to the moral tone of his
household. There is an example to be followed—and cheaply
followed, bearing in mind the decadence of broadcasting.

Aside from this, we can hope for a collapse of the universities.
There are always exceptions, but most are nowadays a combination of
training schools for narrow professional disciplines, and academies of
falsehood. George Orwell once declared of some absurdity “you
need to be an intellectual to believe that”. This needs now to
be amended to “You need a degree to believe that”. I am
not sure the universities, taken as a whole, can be reformed: better,
I suspect, either to wait for their natural decline into irrelevance
or to shut them down at the first opportunity. One of the first acts
of the Ayatollah Khomeini after taking power in Iran was to close all
the universities for three years. The bloody revolution of which this
was a part is, of course, to be condemned. But I have no doubt that
Shiite theology and law were much closer to the humanistic ideal than
the western sociology they replaced. Perhaps historians will one day
trace the growing stability and democratisation of modern Iran to this
educational reform.

But as my readers may have noticed, I tend to be better at
describing problems than giving solutions to them. I can only conclude
by thanking the Social Affairs Unit for inviting me to so stimulating
a discussion, and to hope that I shall be invited to others in
future.

This site may receive compensation if a product is purchasedthrough one of our partner or affiliate referral links. Youalready know that, of course, but this is part of the FTC DisclosurePolicy found here. (Warning: this is a 2,359,896-byte 53-page PDF file!)TLE AFFILIATE